I'm trying to get the full capacity of a 120Gb drive in Linux (Sparc) in ai Sun U10. The bus of the U10 is UDMA/33, so the maximum supported capacity is 137Gb. I have a Seagate ST3120026A drive, which is 120Gb. The listed specifications are

Code:

Cylinders: 16383
Heads: 255
Sectors: 63

I've created the Sun disklabel according to usual specifications:

Code:

Command (m for help): s
Building a new sun disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.

However whenever I use mke2fs, the act of formatting the parition completely locks up the IDE bus. I've experimented with various fdisk partition-creation sizes such as +120G or +120000000000 which of course come close to filling the entire disk but not quite. Those all work fine but using all cylinders does not. Does anyone know of something I'm doing wrong or some sort of known bug I haven't been able to google?

For the record, the disk works fine at full capacity on an x86 machine.

Are you sure the Ultra 10s IDE-controller supports harddisks that big? I can remember having trouble with a 40GB disk. 20GB works just fine in my U10. The bigger one didn´t run whatever I tried (Linux, NetBSD, Solaris). Maybe it depends on the vendor.

I've got a 120GB harddisk running in a U10/333 and a U10/440 without any problems. Make sure you have the latest OBP available for the U10 installed. I never run into this problem just with disks bigger 137GB. Using a WD-1200JB (8MB Cache) that had previously installed solaris. So the disk geometry settings didn't have to be modified by me.

Jup nothing easier than that. Everything basic concering documentation you need for your U10 can be found linked from here:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/U10/U10.html
The "Flash PROM patch" under section "Quick Facts" is what you need to download. Then open your U10 set the EEPROM jumper to writable (If you've got problems to locate it there's a manual for that too), unpack the patch copy the latest under "/" and boot form OBP with full path. (I did it when Solaris was installed but don't know if it works under linux too.) After successfull flashing set the jumper to write disable once more.

I've got a 120GB harddisk running in a U10/333 and a U10/440 without any problems. Make sure you have the latest OBP available for the U10 installed. I never run into this problem just with disks bigger 137GB. Using a WD-1200JB (8MB Cache) that had previously installed solaris. So the disk geometry settings didn't have to be modified by me.

I can confirm this. After installing the update the 120GB disk seems to work.
I didn´t installed the operating system yet, but the hard disk was recognized by Linux and NetBSD without problems. Thanks for the helpful hint.

just a little hint: if you try to load a flash updater image via silo, it won't work.
somehow the elf binary isn't compatible (it contains multiple executable sections?) with the usual format of sparc boot images.
the sun boot loader can load it, if you've got solaris installed, you're lucky.
doing it with a linux-only system isn't impossible, though:
you can either make a bootable cdrom with the image (seems to be a lot of work, i didn't bother trying it) or, which is the easiest way imho, use netboot.
have a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-sparc-netboot-howto.xml, and use a flash-updater image instead of the gentoo-sparc image.
on my machine, it worked out of the box:
tomoe ~ # prtconf -V
OBP 3.31.0 2001/07/25 20:36
this seems to be the last obp release for the ultra5/10, according to sun (they stopped support in 2001)

unbelievable, someone with exactly the same problem (even hardware specifications)!

got to the point where my sun accepts the hard drive i.e. flash updating etc, it recognises the drive correctly but it won't format the final partition (sits around the 100GB+ mark). even tried with solaris, but it doesn't like the final part of the disk either (as the orig poster found, windows is happy enough). guess i'll just have to lose that bit of space.

did the original poster get to use all his space on the drive, can't help but be curious?